A Dog's Life(30)
Vanni was teaching in the Italian department in the prestigious University of California at Berkeley while I was helping the freshmen (and women) at North Dakota State University unravel the mysteries of English grammar. I visited him twice in California. I had gone there to interview the novelist Christopher Isherwood for BBC Radio, and Christopher had picked me up at Los Angeles airport and driven me in his tiny Volkswagen to Santa Monica, where he lived with his partner, the artist Don Bachardy. We recorded our discussion about his life and work in a nearby studio that afternoon. The engineer in charge was a huge man who greeted us warmly as ‘Chris’ and ‘Paul’. He was friendly before the conversation started, but Christopher’s answer to my first question caused him to be distinctly unfriendly when we were due to leave.
Me: Christopher Isherwood, why did you go to Berlin in the early 1930s?
CI: For the boys.
I persevered with my next question, even as I sensed a certain frostiness from the other side of the glass partition. The redneck didn’t like what he was hearing. Christopher went on chirping happily about his career, and I tried not to look at the man who was recording the programme. We were not addressed as ‘Chris’ and ‘Paul’ as we walked out to the car park. An hour earlier we had been ‘regular guys’, but not any more. We were a pair of English faggots now. His expression said as much.
In those days, San Francisco was the gay capital of America, if not the world. I found the city exhilarating and beautiful, especially after the fearful cold of Fargo and the endless flatness of the snow-covered plains. Although it was December, the weather was mild and walking in the sunlit streets and riding on the cable cars were rare but simple pleasures. Vanni showed me the sights, and the two of us spent an afternoon in the Castro district, which was predominantly gay. I found the atmosphere of the place as curious as it was depressing. I had never seen quite so many men with cropped hair and neat moustaches, who appeared to have nothing to do but cruise the bars in search of their lookalikes. This was a new, and strange, kind of narcissism. We were in a self-styled ghetto, I realized, and I couldn’t wait to get out of it. I was happy in the multi-cultured city itself, with its limitless choice of fine restaurants. In Tommaso’s we ate the best pizza to be had outside Naples.
I went to Berkeley with Vanni and met the Italian faculty. At a party there, a bearded man wearing a kaftan and an assortment of beads informed me confidently that he was going to write the greatest of all great American novels. Had he started it? ‘Not yet.’ He put a finger to his forehead. ‘It’s still up here.’ I remarked, as tactfully as I could, that he didn’t look that young, and that when you have embarked on a novel, great or otherwise, time was important. Life is an accidental business, and illness and death are out there, ready to do their worst. He gave me a pitying smile. ‘Are you some kind of a pessimist? I just know when my book is going to come out. It’s still…’ He searched for the apt word. ‘…marinating.’
A real writer had graced the campus earlier that year, in the form of Giorgio Bassani, author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. I love Bassani’s fictions, autobiographical in essence, of Jewish – and other – life in Ferrara in the years preceding the Second World War. Vanni admired them too, but the man turned out to be snobbish and charmless to an extraordinary degree. He refused to drink Californian wine, and had his own vintages sent over from Italy. He was in his fifties, but continued to play accomplished tennis. He sulked whenever he was in danger of losing a match. He was rude to both staff and students, some of whom he deemed stupid. He had been hired for two years as writer-in-residence. When he had completed his first year, he was paid another year’s salary to go home. It had been a bitter experience for everyone. Yet his elegant, mournful books endure, and we have him to thank for discovering and publishing Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (literally The Cheetah, but famously translated as The Leopard). And no one deserves the fate of his last decades, when he was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.
On a second trip to California, during the spring vacation, Vanni and I hired a car from a firm called Rent-a-Dent in Los Angeles and we set off to visit the original Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the setting of Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One. Our journey along the freeway was hindered by the driver of a large truck who kept overtaking our battered saloon with a glee that bordered on the murderous. We wondered if we would ever reach the famous cemetery alive, so determined seemed the truck driver to force us off the road. There had been three crashes that morning, we learned, and we didn’t want to be involved in the fourth. It was with huge relief that we spotted the exit for Glendale.